'My words were not cared for': Customary law, criminality and the 'woman question' in late colonial India. (June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Visweswaran, Kamala
• Is Part Of: Contributions to Indian sociology. Volume 52:Number 2(2018)
• Page Start: 156
• Page End: 185
• Publication Date: 2018-06
• Subjects: customary law -- woman question -- legal subjectivity -- infanticide; India -- Social conditions -- Periodicals; 301.095405
• DOI: 10.1177/0069966718763419
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0069-9667

Abstract

Drawing upon the court case of one woman sentenced for killing her infant in the early decades of the last century, this article reads Pierre Bourdieu's insight on how the trial stages conflicts produced in the social realm as a paradox for explaining how British administrators and Indian village officials negotiated non-conflicting codes of sexual and moral conduct on the basis of colonial ideology and locally fixed caste hierarchies to convict women of infanticide. This article argues that a staging of women's agency is crucial for understanding the colonial conferral of legal subjectivity and for a gendered critique of the Subaltern Studies paradigm of conflict or collaboration as 'dominance without hegemony.'